After multiple rockets from Gaza landed in Israeli territory on Saturday, Israel retaliated against Gaza-based launch sites late Saturday night.
“In response to the three rockets fired earlier this evening at Israel an IAF aircraft targeted three terror activity sites, two weapon storage and manufacturing facilities in the southern Gaza Strip, as well as a terror activity site in the central Gaza Strip,” the IDF said. “Direct hits were confirmed.”
The Israeli strike came hours after sirens wailed in the Hof Ashkelon area, signaling a rocket attack. The rockets landed in fields and did not cause casualties or damage.
According the IDF, nine rockets were fired at Israel in the past two weeks, out of which six hit Israeli territories. Since the beginning of the year, more than 200 rockets, roughly five times the number that were launched towards Israel in all of 2013, have been fired from Gaza at Israel.
Last last year, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon warned that Hamas was seeking a “renewal of violence” by upgrading its terror infrastructure. In February it was reported that between Iran’s arming of Hezbollah in Lebanon and of Hamas in Gaza, its clients were “prepared to saturation bomb Israeli population centers across the country.” Concerns about Iran’s support of Hamas have grown recently as contacts between Iran and Hamas were reported earlier this month.
Last week Ya’alon told a group of foreign military attaches that “the Palestinian Authority (PA) would have to disarm Hamas to signal that it is genuinely pursuing a viable and united Palestinian state.” The continued rocket fire from Gaza in light of the PA’s unwillingness or inability to control Hamas prompted journalists to question the Obama administration last week as to whether Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was really doing all that he could to prevent terror.
Elhanan Miller, the Arab affairs correspondent for the Times of Israe,l argued in The Big Hamas Elephant which appeared in the October 2013 issue of The Tower Magazine, that “the existence of a de facto Hamas-ruled statelet in Gaza, peace between Israel and the Palestinians is likely to remain elusive.” The Tower Magazine’s associate editor Benjamin Kerstein pointed out in the March 2014 issue in Hammered: The Palestinian Peace Paradox that “rockets from Gaza have already succeeded in striking as far as Jerusalem, which is approximately 50 miles from Gaza. Only seven miles separate Ben-Gurion airport from the West Bank.”
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